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The Man Carrying the Ball for Murdoch

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"HILL here," David Hill answered the telephone in his crackling working-class Australian accent. It was the Saturday morning after Fox Television made its first test run as a broadcaster of professional football, a preseason National Football League game in San Francisco last month.

In his Hollywood office, Mr. Hill, the president of Fox Sports, was recovering from the effort and ruminating over the performance.

"I'm exhausted," he said. "No one breathed for the first 20 minutes. Couldn't relax until the end credits ran. But we overcame any vestige of doubt that Fox could do football."

An official for a rival network called to say the game's rating was disappointing, that the baseball strike and Fox's months of tireless promotion should have caused a stampede to the fledgling network.

Ever since Rupert Murdoch bid a breathtaking $1.58 billion last December for the television rights to the National Football Conference for the next four years, Mr. Hill has been scrambling to build a sports broadcasting division from scratch. The eccentric, 48-year-old Australian is an unqualified cheerleader for the start-up, usually brimming with bravado. But Mr. Hill has his moments of doubt. He has been spotted in his office, his head in his hands, and muttering, "I'm bleeping scared."

"I have great mood swings," Mr. Hill conceded. "I wake up a lot at 4 in the morning with a lot on my mind."

He should have a lot on his mind. It is up to Mr. Hill to make good on Mr. Murdoch's billion-dollar-plus gamble, one the biggest bets in the recent history of television. For Mr. Hill, as for the on-the-field quarterbacks like Troy Aikman and Randall Cunningham, the real season begins today. The network starts at noon with its one-hour "Fox N.F.L. Sunday" pregame studio show, then six games including the Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys playing the Pittsburgh Steelers.

For Fox, there is far more at stake than simply success or failure in football. It is a big step into the mass-market mainstream for the seven-year-old Fox Television Network, which has attracted youthful audiences with programs like "The Simpsons" and "Melrose Place."

Featuring big-name N.F.C. teams from major metropolitan markets -- the Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, San Francisco 49ers, Washington Redskins, Chicago Bears and others -- will attract new viewers to Fox, well beyond fans of Bart Simpson and Heather Locklear.

Football is a crucial part of the audience-building drive at Fox, but there are others. After Fox outbid CBS for television rights to the N.F.C. -- NBC has the rights to the N.F.L.'s American Football Conference games, while ABC has Monday night games -- Mr. Murdoch invested $500 million for 20 percent of New World Communications. That deal will permit Fox to switch from weaker UHF stations in 12 cities to stronger VHF stations, including markets where it now has football rights like Detroit, Dallas and Atlanta. Eight of the 12 new stations Fox is picking up were CBS affiliates.

Football, then, is a means to Mr. Murdoch's larger agenda at Fox -- enhancing its brand recognition, increasing the value of Fox stations and broadening the network's reach to the nearly 100 percent of American TV households touched by ABC, CBS and NBC. Today, Fox is available in 98.6 percent of all television households. Pro football should do a lot to bridge Fox's fourth-network credibility gap.

It is only as a long-term investment to build the Fox franchise that the $1.58 billion Mr. Murdoch is paying for football television rights makes sense. He is, after all, spending 49 percent more than CBS paid for the previous four years. When the rights charges of $395 million a year are added to the operating costs for football programming, estimated at $100 million to $150 million annually, nobody expects Fox to make a profit on its four-year deal.

Mr. Murdoch seems to regard questions about the pricetag as quibbling. "Did we overpay?" he asked rhetorically. "Of course we did."

Fox Sports will be the most scrutinized sports start-up ever. ESPN, the last major TV sports kickoff, began in 1979 with a slow-pitch softball game. But Mr. Murdoch doesn't believe in half measures. "We needed something people would come looking for," said Mr. Murdoch, who is now eyeing the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, and baseball. "We could have started with minor sports, but no one would have paid notice."

The established networks all built up their sports divisions gradually. When football began on CBS in 1956, the network paid teams separate fees, and there was no complete N.F.L. network package. William MacPhail, a former vice president of CBS Sports, recalls paying the Green Bay Packers $31,000 one year. In 1962, CBS struck its first network deal with the N.F.L. for $4.7 million.

The times, and the stakes, have certainly changed. Even if Mr. Murdoch's move into pro football is less about profit than a patient bet to build Fox, the goal is still to attract audiences and limit the losses. Analysts expect Fox Sports to lose hundreds of millions of dollars over the next four years as advertising is unable to keep up with costs, because Mr. Murdoch paid the N.F.L. so much for the rights. Still, the financial difference between success and failure could be sizable, and a real worry for the shareholders of the News Corporation, Fox's parent company, if things go poorly.

"For a company like Fox to try to create a brand, using clearly definable programming like the N.F.L. makes great strategic sense," said Christopher Dixon, an analyst for Paine Webber. "The question is at what cost. The jury will be out on that question until the end of the season."

Mr. Hill is the man in charge of managing this enormous financial bet. At first glance, he seems an unnerving choice. "I'm a financial illiterate," he cheerfully confesses, while eating an onion and cheese sandwich in his office.

His manner and personality bear little resemblance to the serious, deal-making executives who tend to head the sports divisions of other networks. On airplane trips, he plays the Tetris video game on his Nintendo Game Boy. He licks a male publicist on an earlobe to reward a suggestion. A man of eclectic interests, he is learning Yiddish expressions. So he has taken to scribbling newly learned Yiddish words on the back of his appointment book: "nebbish," "schmear" and "mensch."

Mr. Hill's notion of a business night out in Chicago recently was to take his staff to a blues bar, where he gushed over legendary guitarist Buddy Guy, who owns the place. A devoted surfer, Mr. Hill loves Bruce Brown's 1966 cult documentary about surfers, "The Endless Summer," and he attended the premiere of its sequel this year. His daughter Anne's birth announcement in June was accompanied by a quotation from Martin Farquhar Tupper, a 19th century English writer.

Mr. Hill's philosophy for success in sports programming is simple: be generous in signing up name-brand talent and make sure the production is slick and cutting-edge. Audience ratings and revenues, he figures, will follow. "As much a business dyslexic as I am, I know that," he said.

He has spared little expense in hiring well-known football commentators and personalities. Fox is paying John Madden, football's manic Rabelaisian wit, a total of $30 million for four years, making him the highest paid man, on the field or behind a microphone, in the sport. Pat Summerall, Mr. Madden's longtime partner at CBS, will get $1.5 million a year. Terry Bradshaw, the former star quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, will collect $1.75 million annually from Fox. A sportscasting newcomer, Jimmy Johnson, who left as coach of the Cowboys last year, after winning two Super Bowls, has been signed up for $600,000 a year.

BESIDES high-priced on-the-air talent, Fox is banking on the sports programming instincts of Mr. Hill. First in Australia, and later for Mr. Murdoch's Sky Television in Britain, Mr. Hill adapted the tools of American sports TV by using more cameras in more locations, instant replays, enhanced graphics and flashier analyst commentary. For coverage of the America's Cup yacht races in 1987 in Australia -- "little triangles on blue water," he calls it -- he put tiny cameras aboard yachts for close-up coverage.

"I saw a guy who cared absolutely nothing about boating bring that event alive," said Geoff Mason, the former executive producer of ABC Sports.

In 1988, Mr. Murdoch hired Mr. Hill away from the rival Nine Network, owned by another Australian entrepreneur, Kerry Packer. "The Nine Network was always our competition, and Hill was a legendary figure in Sydney," Mr. Murdoch recalled. The Hill reputation was based largely on using American sports programming techniques to alter the look and quicken the pace of soccer, cricket, yachting and auto racing.

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MR. MURDOCH liked Mr. Hill's work in Australia so much that he soon gave Mr. Hill two sports start-ups in Europe to direct: Eurosport, a pan-European cable sports service, much like ESPN, which Mr. Murdoch eventually sold, and Sky Sports, a fast-growing British network for satellite dish owners.

What Mr. Hill did to cricket programming, first in Australia, and then in Britain, is typical of his approach. The sport of flat bats, white pullover sweaters and tea breaks is decidedly slow-moving -- so much so that cricket's detractors say that you can gain weight while playing the sport. Mr. Hill abhors boredom, and he was committed to accelerating the pace of cricket, at least for television viewers. A smile comes over Mr. Hill's ruddy face, topped by bushy white curls, when he describes the changes he made and the mixed reaction to his innovations in presenting the tradition-steeped sport.

With a black marker, Mr. Hill sketches a circular cricket field with two triangles on top to depict the conventional locations of television cameras, behind the batsmen (hitter) and facing the bowler (pitcher).

"Cricket was always covered from one end, so the bowler bowls from one end, and all you'd see is the batsman's butt," Mr. Hill recalled. "That was stupid, so we put cameras at the other end as well . . . This was regarded as the end of civilization."

Then came the duck. Mr. Hill ordained that an animated duck waddle across the TV screen when a batsman whiffed to illustrate the term, "out for a duck." The first time he used the duck animation, Mr. Hill did not give any advance warning to the commentator, who had once captained the Australian national team. When he saw it, the ex-cricket star, with voice shaking, said, "It's obvious David Hill never played cricket!"

WHEN Sky Sports acquired Premier League English soccer, Mr. Hill dubbed the weekly presentation "Monday Night Football" as homage to the long-running ABC series created by his idol, Roone Arledge, the sports-programming impresario who started ABC's long-running weekly football game broadcast.

But does Mr. Hill know American football? Mr. Hill pondered the question one June evening in the backyard of a rented Brentwood house he shares with his third wife, Joan, and their infant daughter, Anne.

"How much do I know about football?" he asked aloud.

"He doesn't know much," said Barry Frank, Madden's agent. "I'm not sure if he'll know if some of the people he's hired are good or not."

"He's absorbed the visceral element," said Tim Green, a neophyte Fox analyst. "Now he's working his way outward on the technical aspects."

Mr. Hill's football I.Q. is good, not great. He knows big names, big plays. He loves the hitting, the sounds, the drama, the quick turnarounds in fortune. He knows Emmitt Smith, the Dallas Cowboys running back, from Emmett Kelly, the famed sad-faced circus clown.

Yet Mr. Hill, colleagues say, favors a wide open and loose management style, so Fox Sports is not depending on his grasp of American football minutiae. Although he is a protean chatterer -- a "human filibuster," his friend, film director Peter Faiman, says -- he listens well, and gives his executives extensive free reign.

THE lavish start-up means satisfying the wish lists of defectors from other networks. Sandy Grossman, Mr. Madden's CBS director, will present Fox games with 12 cameras, four more than he had at CBS.

Mr. Hill's core group has worked merciless hours, and many are smoking so much it seems that Marlboro has bought a sponsorship at Fox Sports. Rick Dovey, Mr. Hill's chief of staff at Sky Sports, said that pace is nothing new: "It was easy to work for Hill as long as you wanted to work 100 hours a week. He doesn't organize well but picks people to put his vision into effect."

Most importantly, Mr. Hill has satisfied Mr. Madden, a 21st-round draft choice of the Philadelphia Eagles in 1958, who is now the highest paid man -- the Cowboys' quarterback Troy Aikman is next, averaging $6.25 million a year -- in all of football. Mr. Madden refused Capital Cities/ABC and General Electric's NBC, whose offer included a G.E. train to travel to games.

MR. MADDEN is the totem for Fox Sports. He's in the most promotional spots. He was host of one of Fox's pre-season specials. He adorned the cover of TV Guide. He will call virtually every important game, including the 1997 Super Bowl. He is a happy man, for aside from his hardware, shoe, video game and athlete's foot spray endorsements, Mr. Madden is consumed by football. So, for now, is Fox.

"They'll listen to anything," Mr. Madden said. "At CBS, we'd do some of my ideas and not others. Anything I've thought we ought to do at CBS, we'll do at Fox. It's selfish, but Fox Sports is only football."

If Fox's game telecasts match the quality attained by Madden & Company at CBS, Mr. Hill will be satisfied. That will be a big challenge given the intricate choreography required of American football programming with its constant replays, instant on-screen diagrams of plays and cutting from one camera to another. And behind Fox Sports's big-name stars are a corps of low-priced, mainly young announcers who have called few if any football games.

Fox, by all accounts, faces a huge challenge in trying to attract a football audience as large as CBS had, given the smaller network's more limited reach. But Mr. Hill's staff is not conceding any losses yet. "Say we get 90 percent of the CBS football audience," said Tracy Dolgin, executive vice president of marketing. "I have to get 10 percent percent back. If I don't, I'll hold a gun to my head -- after I'm fired."

Still, the top Fox executives are more concerned with using football to build the network's franchise than with this season's audience ratings. "We'll build our coverage, strengthen our affiliates and increase revenues year after year," said Chase Carey, the chairman of Fox Television. "No question that after four years, the N.F.C. deal will be materially profitable for us."

Mr. Hill obviously hopes so. But he also has to worry week to week. Before the kickoff today, he seemed to be suffering from some preseason jitters, his moods swinging between confidence and anxiety.

In a self-assured moment, he said, "In reality, this isn't so hard. If you never think you can fail, you probably won't."

Yet later, Mr. Hill ruefully joked, "What's that the captain of the Titantic said? 'How's it going? Fine!' " David Hill Current position: President of Fox Sports. Born: May 21, 1946; Newcastle, Australia. Education: Normanhurst High School; Sydney, Australia. Family: Wife, Joan, and daughter, Anne, two months old. Two children from a previous marriage: Jane, 17; and Julian, 14. Business idol: Roone Arledge, ABC sports producer of "Monday Night Football." Car: Ford Explorer. Last Book Read: "The Great Train Robbery," by Michael Crichton.

A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 1994, on Page 3003001 of the National edition with the headline: The Man Carrying the Ball for Murdoch. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe